Thread: What is your hardest-learned lesson in FX?

What's your hardest learned lesson in FX?

I ask this question as I would be very curious to see what hardships some traders here have gone through to learn something the hard way.
I have recently started my long and twisting street in taking the initial steps towards my albeit, hopeful potential of being able to be a self explanatory FX trader.
Already at the initial 2 months of being live I have come across such obstacles I will be sure to remember for the rest of my life.
Personally, for me, the hardest lesson I have learnt so far would be to respect the market and take what it provides, as well as to not ask for more than that which you can't have as a result of being unrealistic, and also in most truths greedy. I have taken this as some fantastic advice from a fellow FF manhood and friend who is words spoke out to me personally profoundly after I was very lucky enough to enter a trade which had improved my account size by 100%. Upon this in all the excitement I thought it would be a good idea to move my SL to BE and let it sail risk free in the hopes of earning even more from the time I awakened the next morning. Of course, regretfully I was just met by the lack of any new found profits to my trading account and an wonderful opportunity missed because of believing I knew better. Though I lost the cash that I could have only taken, I feel that so I have learned something a lot more valuable, and that is a lesson well learned to recall later on and a mistake never to be repeated again.
I expect that maybe my mishaps could help prevent somebody else from going through the same misery because I did and I'd also really like for this thread to have the ability to turn in to an abune of other traders mishaps and adventures shared so that we can all learn from each other.

There are practically no long term successful traders in forum. Trading systems although they're a fantastic number of them are composed by too enthusiastic 1-2-3 months with some success traders and they're 99.9% failures. No objectivity and also a lot of confidence when there should be none.

Originally Posted by ;

quote entire opposite, taking small profits is absolute fear trading, a 10 pip win will not generate enough profit and in the event that you could not manage the trade to shed then should never of taken it at the first place. The simple fact that the market was in your favour for a little bears no relevance. Let all your entries run, when the market decides it wants to go your way you will reap huge wins the early closers never accomplish.

Bang on. The direction and steepness of my equity curve changed (for the better) as soon as I learned this. Van Tharp's books helped me get this vital point.
I forced myself to attempt it originally only as a intelectual excersise and then felt somewhat stupid that what everyone had been saying was in fact right!

Here, a few nuggets of trading intellect: http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?t=248102

Here is a thread with a few market secrets: http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?t=4067

Very interesting posts - I visit alot in those articles of what I've done wrongly and learnt from so you're not alone.

When I first started out I just couldn't get around cutting my losses and bailing out. I had a stop loss but might try and change it and of course I typically lost money, and so I learnt to stick to my strategy, maintain the stop loss where it is (or move in accore together with my principles ) and when I dropped then it was just a losing trade and emotionally I could proceed. Van Tharp's book Trading Beyond the Matrix helped alot.

Among the greatest things I learnt was to shut a trade before Friday NY shut (I don't exchange long term). One Monday I started my account to find there was slippage and of course I dropped out. I wrote this into my Trading Strategy (need to close trades Friday night) and I stick to the Plan. But I believed I had been a disiplined person in regards to money and then I started Trading and learnt how much fear I had around it. It's difficult to conquer however you can do it if you really decide to work on your emotions.

A guy I worked with used one of those automated Robot Trading systems - it killed his whole account overnight. He swore he would never trade again and that I think he took off 6 months. He's back today, using his very own egy and is pretty succesfull so that it pays learn from other's mistakes too. The amusing thing with Trading is, for me anyway, I really don't really learn until I go through the encounter of the error initial hand - then it is something I'll never forget.